Evil can't stand prayer

12/5/2006

By the Rev. Huey WoodThe Storyteller

The story is told about an old Methodist preacher by the name of J. A. George who was a peace-loving gentleman but never ran from trouble.

This story has it that he was preaching at a revival where the yard was full of wagons and bug-gies drawn by mules and horses. The owners had tied the mules and horses to trees and hitching posts in the yard. Four boys in the community were down-right mean, and they had unhitched the mules and horses and run some of them off from the church.

The next night Brother George came and walked to the pulpit and took a pistol and laid it on the pulpit and called the boys by name and said, “Boys, tonight we are going to worship without trouble.”

After the service, the leader walked up to the preacher and chal-lenged him to a fight. The preacher said, “Well, if that is what you want, let’s go across the road off the church ground.”

This was a wooded area. The preacher said, “Young man, before I undertake something like this, I always pray.”

He got down on his knees and he began, “Lord, don’t let me hurt this boy by crippling him for life. I don’t want to break his body to where he can’t work because his family needs him. Lord, just let me teach him a lesson that will last him a lifetime.”

When the preacher closed his prayer, the young man was gone.

All of us should know by now that this is one of the great spiritual truths: Evil cannot stand prayer. One of the things that Satan cannot stand for us to talk to God. We remember that on the mount of temptation Jesus quoted the word of God to him and it soon defeated Satan — he could not deny it’s truth. It is for this reason that the Bible calls us to keep the Word of God on our heart and our lips.

When I was serving that church in that county, those persons who were present that night knew that it was the prayer of this old preacher that actually defeated the young man because he knew that the prayer was reaching God. This tells us that God’s man and God together can handle any situation.

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